There are wide varieties of product offerings available in the market today that serve multiple purposes and functions, including product offerings that are used in fulfilling the needs of particular market segments such as in the prime label market and other business communication assemblies that are used to convey or handle information.
Printed products, such as pieces that are intended to be used in business communications, can be delivered in a wide variety of formats, constructions and configurations. Normally, one of the most significant limiting factors for a manufacturer being able to produce a particular construction or expand product capabilities is the equipment the manufacturer has on hand to generate such printed pieces.
Traditional manufacturers of business communications, such as business forms and labels, are also usually limited in the type of jobs that a manufacturer will accept based on size of the job, or more particularly the order quantity or value of the order. That is, due to cost factors, a customer will not place an order with a manufacturer for a small to medium sized piece quantity as the set up or make ready of the job makes the order cost prohibitive, even assuming that the manufacturer would accept the order if a particular price could be obtained to justify production.
The foregoing difficulty is largely based on conventional manufacturing techniques that normally utilize webs of material that are successively printed or otherwise treated in order to produce a finished product assembly. As such, small to medium sized runs of product are generally not adaptable to this type of manufacture due to the amount of material (length of a web) that must be used in order to prepare a particular job and manufacture the product in a cost effective manner.
Such conventional manufacturers have normally produced product runs that range in the hundreds of thousands to millions or even tens of millions of pieces for a single order. As such, the equipment that is used to produce this level or quantity of product is then set up to handle only large manufacturing runs. The apparatus used in this type of fulfillment will normally only operate efficiently in this higher range of production quantities and often cannot be reconfigured. Thus, even if a manufacturer wished to pursue smaller runs or orders sizes, the manufacturer is faced with the dilemma of making new capital expenditures to purchase equipment that specializes in this type of application not to mention having to retrain existing personnel or hire and train new employees to generate this type of production activity.
Another drawback facing conventional manufacturers of business communication products is that in addition to the possibility of retooling the production infrastructure, the producers may also need to seek out new sales channels and distributors for products that fall within the smaller production run niche as the conventional sales channels are likely still focusing on procuring orders for larger production runs.
A still further drawback of trying to migrate to smaller customer applications relates to quality of the pieces that need to be generated. With the focus of the market slowly shifting to smaller runs, the end user is now demanding a greater image quality than that typically associated with conventionally printed products. It is believed that the reason for such far reaching changes is that budgets for marketing and business communications have been cut back in recent years and as such, end users want more from each piece that is produced rather than relying on the quantity of pieces to generate the desired result.
Conventional processes that are used today, for example, in creating business communication pieces, such as prime labels and other pressure sensitive label configurations, are typically based on a continuous web technology that uses flexographic presses. The process includes the feeding of a continuous web of material, such as a preformed web of pressure sensitive laminate which normally consists of a top ply having a layer of adhesive on its underside that is covered by a release liner to form the laminate assembly through the press. The web is then processed through a press, typically a flexographic press, and an image is applied to the web by various stations. The web may then be collected, die-cut and the individual labels removed and applied.
Flexography is commonly used today for the printing of decorative items including the rendering of packaging and employs a series of plates and one or more stations, containing inks, to apply colored images to the web as the web traverses the press. Through improvements in ink qualities and other modifications and enhancements in the technology, the image quality in flexographic presses and resulting products has improved to about 150 lines per inch.
Typically, for a point of reference, screens that have rulings of about 60 to 100 lines per inch are normally used to make halftone printed images for newspapers. Screens with about 120 to 150 lines per inch are commonly used today to produce images for magazines and commercial printing. Such screens are regularly produced by electronic dot generation.
Electronic dot generation is normally performed by computers that use unique screening algorithms in cooperation with electronic scanners and image setters to produce halftone images that are to be subsequently used to render an image. The pixels of digitized images are first assembled into dots that are then used to form shapes, sizes, rulings, etc. which create the ultimate image produced on the substrate.
While flexographic technology or flexography is desirable for use in such printing due to the economies that can be achieved when compared with other types of printing processes, such as lithography, there are a number of drawbacks in utilizing this process for certain applications. Initially, the quality is limited, despite improvements in the technology to about 150 lines per inch. This can make some complicated graphics appear “grainy”. Other images, such as those that use flesh tones or deep or rich colors, may look faded or “washed out”. The effects of this level of image resolution can detract from the product appearance which may diminish the value of the technology and the products produced particularly for the prime label market. With increasing sophistication of consumers, as well as technology and expectations from each, such effects may be undesirable to potential end users.
Flexography also suffers from other drawbacks, such as the time that is involved in preparing a production job to run or “make ready” as it may otherwise be known in the industry. That is, the steps that are used to prepare the flexography equipment for running a particular job or order. This “make ready” process includes such activity as the preparation of multiple plates to produce the image at each station, mixing inks, calibration and alignment of the images between stations and the like. Operation of the flexography presses may also include multiple operators which can add to manufacturing costs. In addition, waste can also be a problem with such conventional printing technologies in that a number of feet, yards or meters of web material must be processed through the press in order to have the colors reach a predetermined threshold and to ensure appropriate registry of the stations as they are printing the images on the web. The amount of material wasted can be several times the length of the press or up to several hundred feet of material. The use of such volumes of materials obviously increases the cost of the operation. Thus, due to the make ready process and waste factors, the production of products (e.g. prime labels) through the use of flexography may then be limited to serving only certain market segments, namely large market segments. Markets that are applicable for this technology segment are generally believed to be those orders for large quantities of several hundred thousand or millions of pieces, which potentially leaves the smaller label market, e.g. 100 to 1,000,000 labels, unfulfilled or at least not adequately served by currently available technologies due to cost and materials thresholds.
Another drawback believed to be associated with flexographic technologies is that the technology cannot provide any variability in the product, including such basic functionality as sequential numbering, addressing or adding promotional text in connection with a seasonal advertisement or other offering without the addition of further processing stations. If such features are required by an end user or customer, such as with product date or coding, this function generally cannot be performed by flexographic presses without the inclusion of additional stations. Instead, these features typically must be achieved through an off line operation, such as ink jetting, often after the label has been applied to the container or carton. Alternatively, the ink jetting may be performed directly on the container as part of a separate operation.
Flexographic presses normally have a number of pre-determined stations. For example a four color press may have only four stations that can be used to treat or process the web. Thus, if other stations are to be added, such as a numbering head, the manufacturer likely then has to reduce the number of colors that can be added to the web as one station has been surrendered for the numbering head.
Flexographic technology also limits the ability to add personalization to products produced on such presses. This may be particularly desirable in certain market segments where such prime label products on consumer package goods (“CPG”) may further enhance the product or service offering by making the product more attractive to prospective purchasers, thereby increasing the appeal to the consumer of the product or service.
Identifiers such as labels, business cards or tags may also be readily rendered using desktop equipment. While the resolution may be slightly improved when compared with conventional flexographic technology, speeds of application are significantly reduced as the images are processed in a sheet wise fashion on desktop equipment. This results in only a few sheets per minute being produced as opposed to hundreds of feet per minute that are commonly capable of being processed by flexographic equipment. That is, the desktop unit may only handle and print one sheet at a time before the next sheet is advanced for printing or imaging when compared with a conventional web fed process which produces sheets at a faster rate. Thus, in using such a desktop process one may only be able to render a handful of sheets per minute as opposed to a flexography operation that may process several hundred feet per minute. Use of desktop processes is thus not likely efficient in trying to generate hundreds and certainly not thousands of labels, but may be useful in creating a few dozen labels for very small applications such as a small home or small office environment.
What is needed, therefore, is a continuous production system by which high quality graphics provided in a sheet wise environment can be used to create products for a number of distinct applications in an endless manufacturing system. For example, graphics having a resolution in excess of about 150 lines per inch can be produced in an efficient and cost effective manner, such as in a continuous system operating at greater than fifty feet per minute. Moreover, a system which can add substantial variability to the product as well as other features, such as embossments, over laminates, variable printing or imaging and the like, would greatly expand the penetration of this form of business communication in the marketplace. The present invention seeks to provide a system for producing an intermediate assembly that is capable of having a number of different surface configurations, e.g. labels, cards, tags, plastics, films and the like. The surface configurations, which will consist of a series of discrete individual elements will each have printing or imaging that includes graphical or resolution quality of about 150 or more lines per inch and preferably more than 300 lines per inch, which is approximately equal to about 2500 to 3500 dots per inch (“DPI”) in order to create a high quality image product that is intended to be aesthetically appealing to the consumer and to more effectively communicate the business message of the application.